Your keyboard is just a small portion of your iPhone’s system, but it greatly affects your overall iOS experience. With this, it is such a joy that Apple has finally decided to significantly improve the system’s autocorrection capability by employing AI.
According to Apple, iOS 17 will employ a transformer language model, an on-device machine learning language model. As the company puts it, this will bring the autocorrect capability of its devices to a whole new level by learning the typing behavior of the users “every time they type.” In simplest terms, this will allow you to personalize your iPhone’s autocorrection behavior. For instance, if users commonly use swearing in their typing behavior, iOS 17 will learn this. With this, autocorrection can now prevent unnecessary and infuriating suggestions like “ducking” when chatting with friends. The same thing will also apply to the other words commonly used by the user.
Even more, the autocorrection in iOS 17 should now be able to suggest corrections at the sentence level. With this, aside from being able to correct multiple words at once, Apple said it will also provide autocorrections to “fix more types of grammatical mistakes.” In relation to this, the model will make relevant predictive suggestions while you are typing, so “adding entire words or completing sentences is as easy as tapping the space bar, making text entry faster than ever.”
On the other hand, if the autocorrect commits mistakes, you will notice that the words automatically changed by the system will be underlined. This will allow you to easily see the changes in case you want to revert to the word you originally typed. If you do this manual correction, the model will learn it as well to prevent the same future mistakes.
Those with eligible devices can now try iOS 17 and its improved autocorrect feature. Currently, the update is still in the beta stage, but it is expected to release officially this fall.
